hawkeyeMI writes: They have posted a notice, which begins, "We want to notify our community that on Friday, our team discovered and blocked suspicious activity on our network. In our investigation, we have found no evidence that encrypted user vault data was taken, nor that LastPass user accounts were accessed. The investigation has shown, however, that LastPass account email addresses, password reminders, server per user salts, and authentication hashes were compromised."

hawkeyeMI writes: Barclays this week downgrades the entire electric sector of the U.S. high-grade corporate bond market to underweight, saying it sees long-term challenges to electric utilities from solar energy, and that the electric sector of the bond market isn’t pricing in these challenges right now. It’s a noteworthy downgrade since electric utilities which make up nearly 7.5% of Barclays’ U.S. Corporate Index by market value.

hawkeyeMI writes: "When Google launched the Chromebook Pixel, it was not long before people started trying to boot normal Linux distributions on it. With Linus Torvalds taking an interest, patches were quickly merged into the Linux git repository, and I continue building the latest version and collecting fixes from elsewhere. I've written up the steps required to get an almost-fully-functional pixel running Debian Wheezy. As of today, I've incorporated fixes that eliminate the audio popping and volume control problems. The only real remaining problem I have is that I can't yet control the keyboard backlight, although I've compiled and loaded a module that is supposed to control it. I'd love it if a Slashdotter more adept than me at kernel hacking could sort that one out."

hawkeyeMI writes: "I live in a small, rural town nestled in some low hills. Our town has access to only one DSL provider, and it's pretty terrible. However, a regional fiber project is just being completed, and some of the fiber is in fact running directly past my house.

Currently, there are no last-mile providers in my area, and the regional project only considers itself a middle-mile provider, and will only provide service to last-mile providers. Assuming this will not be my day job, that the local populace is rather poor, and that because of the hills, line-of-sight service will be difficult, how could I set myself up as an ISP? I have considered WiFi mesh networking, and even running wires on the power/telephone polls, but the required licensing and other issues are foreign to me. What would you do?"

hawkeyeMI writes: "Valve has moved one step closer to releasing Steam for Linux, and they want beta testers that have a lot of experience with Linux. Knowing Slashdot, many of you probably fit the bill. So, if you'd like to try to get into the beta, go fill out the survey! You will need a Steam account to do so."

hawkeyeMI writes: "One of the most difficult things about using Bitcoin, the peer-to-peer currency, is getting sovereign currencies into the exchanges. A company called BitInstant has been trying to remedy that for some time, but today has launched the most accessible methods ever for getting USD (and other currencies) into popular exchanges. With their rollout today, one can now deposit cash from Wal-Mart, CVS, 7-11, MoneyGram, and many other locations in the USA, in addition to the major banks they previously supported. Note: although I am involved with Bitcoin I do NOT have any relationship with BitInstant."

hawkeyeMI writes: "There's a story today in the Wall Street Journal about a problem faced by India's outsourcing industry; while there are many graduates from high school and college, most of them lack the critical thinking and English speaking skills needed for work in call centers, and for more skilled labor. The problem is especially keen where communication with the English-speaking world is most needed. This mirrors my own experiences with various firms on Elance, and with GetFriday and AskSunday. Maybe the outsourcing 'threat' espoused by many in IT is hitting its limits?"

hawkeyeMI writes: "I have a small scientific services company, and we end up generating fairly large datasets (2-3 TB) for each customer. We don't have to ship all of that, but we do need to keep some compressed archives. The best I can come up with right now is to buy some large hard drives, use software RAID in linux to make a RAID5 set out of them, and store them in a safe deposit box. I feel like there must be a better way for a small business, but despite some research into Blu-ray, I've not been able to find a good, cost-effective alternative. A tape library would be impractical at the present time. If anyone would have some ideas, I figure it would be the Slashdot audience. What do you recommend?"

hawkeyeMI writes: CardioSolv, LLC, a company that is commercializing academic heart simulation software, is beginning a beta trial of their heart simulator and web interface. The simulator is capable of handling a whole human heart using accurate human-derived ionic models. Its capacity is limited only by the constraints of VirtualBox and the machine on which it is running. All of the necessary tools will be bundled in a VirtualBox machine image. The company is now taking sign-ups from academic users on its site. (Disclosure: I am a founder of the company and this is my project.)Link to Original Source